


Stormy Haze (Calm Sea)

by which_chartreuse



Category: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV)
Genre: Alter Egos, Could be post-canon, Drunkenness, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Joel Maisel mentioned, Sharing a Bed, Someday, Susie Myerson mentioned, brief mentions of future deaths, could be canon compliant, mostly one-sided pov, references to s3e5, roleplay? maybe? if you squint?, tearjerker (maybe)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-22 10:55:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22381798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/which_chartreuse/pseuds/which_chartreuse
Summary: or, Take My Time (It's always been too late)~``~“You know that expression, 'three sheets to the wind'?” he suddenly asks as he falls sideways into her.“Yes, I do,” she affirms with a small giggle, voice light but smile tight with some worry.“Good, that's good,” is all he manages.(And that is a terrible, misleading summary)
Relationships: Lenny Bruce & Miriam Weissman, Lenny Bruce (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)/Miriam "Midge" Maisel
Comments: 13
Kudos: 57





	Stormy Haze (Calm Sea)

“Oh, Lenny...” The way she says his name almost hurts. It almost cuts through the liquor scented waves rolling over him and pierces his heart. Almost.

He pulls himself together, as best he can. Straightens in his seat and smooths his tie. Crosses his arms defiantly across his chest.

“Don't you start with me, too,” he scolds, jabbing an accusatory cigarette in her direction before realizing he's letting his smoke smolder down to ash without enjoying it. He takes a drag. “'Oh Lenny!'” His impression is mean, and he scoffs.

But she slides into the seat across from him anyway.

“What are we drinking?” she asks, all the pity suddenly gone from her voice. He eyes her and she's all business and quick whit with a gilding of innocence again. But there's also that glint of steel.

He snaps a finger and makes a circle in the air with his hand, and like magic two drinks appear. He nods appreciation, but watches the way Miriam's cheeks faintly pinken as she looks the waitress in the eye to thank her.

He's been drinking cheap bourbon for...days, it feels like. He watches over the edge of his glass, watches her nose scrunch as she sniffs her drink (his drink, he thinks). When she throws it back she barely winces, though.

“How many before I'm caught up?” she asks, too chipper, and waves the waitress back over.

“Martinis,” she says, grabs the girl's arm as she turns. “Gin, not vodka, and keep 'em coming.” She's making that intense eye contact again, and Lenny slumps back in his seat, relieved for a moment the gaze is not on him.

“How's the bartender here?”

She doesn't really look at him as she asks. More relief. The boozy waves wash over again as he returns to sinking.

“Thorough,” he manages to respond. She laughs a little, and his lips involuntarily lift at the sound. But the glass in his hand is empty, and all the glasses in front of him, too.

She sighs then, and his eyes flick back over her face, but she's quick. The pity is already gone, and the worry only lingers another moment in the strain of her smile. Then that's gone, too.

“Aren't you going to ask how I'm doing?” she asks, putting on an offended face with her eyebrows up around her hairline.

The martinis arrive and he plucks the olive out of his, eyeballs it. “How rude of me,” he simpers at her, tossing the olive into her glass. “How ever have you been, Midge?” His voice isn't quite as high as when he was mocking her, but it's dripping with insincerity and she rolls her eyes at him. And seizes the opening anyway.

Words are bubbling out of her like an open hydrant at the height of summer. He picks out words here and there, the names of her children, the names of clubs he's been barred from. His sodden brain clings to words like “divorce” and “lawyers” – and he thinks once, maybe, “gun” – but by the time he manages to break the alcoholic surface she's talking about hats and handbags again. And he bobs back under.

He nurses his martini while she drinks hers like water, and the collection of stemware on her side of the table grows to match the tumblers on his. She keeps talking, though, and he stays decidedly not-sober. Though his eyes regain their focus, and he watches her.

Watches her pale arms shrug out from under her jacket. Watches her gesticulate. Watches the rise and fall of her ocean as he regains the surface of his own.

When the waitress comes round again he finds his voice, holds out a hand to cut Midge off. “Coffee,” he says. “Please.”

There's another of her sighs, but this time the sound doesn't hurt him and her smile doesn't pinch at the corners of her mouth. And there's that delicate pink again. He thinks she'll ask him now. Ask how bad it is, or how long it's been, or at least how he's doing. But it doesn't come.

This time the relief buoys him up (he doesn't enjoy lying, but he'll do it if he has to). His head is above water now, and the coffee tastes of the sight of land. And the silence...

They eye each other over the coffee mugs.

“So,” she finally says, and glances at her wristwatch.

“So,” he echoes. “Wanna get out of here?”

“Sure,” she says, and then, “Let's take a walk.”

He wrests several crumpled bills from his pocket and tosses them to the table beside her smooth ones. Manages to stand and gesture ahead of himself for her without much trouble. Watches the bob of her head as she shifts towards the street. But as he makes to follow her he realizes he hasn't regained his land-legs yet.

He moves slowly, turns up his jacket collar, and offers her his arm at the door. She takes it.

~``~

The night chill helps to sharpen his senses, and he does his best not to crowd too far into her space, but Miriam is supporting him more than he's escorting her. Her free hand tightens around his arm without comment from her lips.

He takes in all these details – the slight breeze dancing at his collar, the strength of her hand, the red of her lipstick – and manages not to stumble over his own feet at the same time.

The first curb is another story.

He looks over the edge like he's staring into an abyss, and he wonders what he's doing here. How he ended up on this street corner with this woman. And all he wants to do is lay back in the waves.

It takes several tugs and some coaxing before he meets her blue eyes and braves the step.

“You know that expression, 'three sheets to the wind'?” he suddenly asks as he falls sideways into her.

“Yes, I do,” she affirms with a giggle and a huff, voice light but smile tight with some worry.

“Good, that's good,” is all he manages as he rights himself, pats the arm once more looped through his, and strides on into the street.

His lead doesn't last long, and he is soon listing into her shoulder and focused more on the cream and chocolate warmth of her beside him than on their direction of travel.

His gate continues to lean and roll on the ocean in his head, but there are no more stumbles. The city is almost empty and quiet, and he realizes it must be much later than he thought.

“I apologize,” he says, really looking at her profile in the dim streetlight. “For earlier.”

She half faces him, but keeps them moving forward. “Earlier?” she echoes, a question, with a question mark in her brows and on those lips. She must have reapplied that red lipstick while he wasn't paying attention.

“For that unflattering impression,” he says. Winces. “Not even an impression. I apologize for mocking your concern,” he corrects himself.

“I've heard worse.” She brushes it off, pointedly avoiding the concern part. She's watching the pavement in front of them as she disappears into the momentary expanse between streetlamps.

“Still, it was rude,” he says. “And, uh, I _am_ sorry.”

He feels her eyes shift from the pavement to his face. Feels the beacon call of her beside him.

He wants to look at her. Wants to stare into her blinding light and dash himself against the rocks anyway. But he's found his feet beneath him, and her eyes turn away to the night.

Her hand still grips his arm, and her shoulder still presses against him, but he's holding his own a bit better now. He's almost unnerved to find she's somehow steered them back to his block. Almost. But of course she knows. Somehow, she knows.

He stops on the stoop, gently slips from her grasp. And Miriam sighs that sigh. Not the pity one, the other one. It still goes right through him, and he reaches for the cigarettes and light out of habit. Offers her the last one.

He stares at her through the smoke. Not just watching her bring the cigarette to her lips and the slight glint of the watch on her pale, pale wrist. Stares. Like this one cigarette has finally given him the courage to blind himself in her radiance, unblinking.

She stares back, and he can hear the music echoing across the water. Another cigarette, another city.

Her eyes seem to dance, and her lips flicker upward before pursing around her cigarette. Her emotions play across her face in quick succession, and he imagines the thoughts that might accompany them. But he doubts she's following the same line of thinking he is, and even with all these tiny expressions, she is inscrutable.

He doubts she hears the music, doubts she remembers. With one more long pull he's done. Safely ashore, no need for lighthouses. Memory tucked back into a dark place in his mind. He stubs out the cigarette in a barren flowerpot and turns to the door.

“I'll walk you up,” she says. He's guarded, and the sound of her voice rolls off him. He refuses to look to see if her expression matches what he hears. But she's following him up the first flight. Then the second. And she's still right there when he fumbles the key into the lock.

“Coffee?” He hears himself ask and winces into the scarred wood of the apartment door, pushing it open.

It's a mistake to invite her in. It's all been a big mistake from the beginning. But he's nothing if not a masochist, and she stands in the midst of his clutter. His books and his newspapers and his reams of legal documents. The upended box of records. His chicken-scratch scribblings scrawled across it all. (The needle...)

And he watches her turn on her spot.

Watches her expression settle into one that no amount of bourbon or smoke (maybe morphine, but that thought is fleeting) can protect him from.

“Lenny,” she speaks his name, quiet, and it's swallowed up in the silence of his rooms.

~``~

His angry indignation is gone, long abandoned on the floor of the bar. The gentle roll of his drunkenness has receded from his mind, from his limbs, into his stomach. The pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket is empty.

His defenses are all gone, and it _does_ hurt. He has been cut somewhere where his heart used to be. Used to be.

Because her expression, and his name on her lips have destroyed him. The brief fantasies that may have played through his thoughts are nightmares. The ocean is pouring out of him through the incision in his chest, stinging with salt.

“Lenny,” she speaks again, soft but clear. Her eyes are glassy in the dim light.

“Miriam...” Her name flows out of him, unbidden, sad and warm, and desperate.

He's collapsing, he can feel the ground crumble beneath him. And he watches her, begging her not to pity him with the force of whatever willpower he has left. But he's been following her beacon from land all along, and now he's falling from the cliffs.

A tear falls from her cheek, and he lurches forward as if to catch it. Wraps her slender waist in his arms. (He can hear the music again, just for a moment)

“Lenny,” she breathes into the lapel of his jacket. Then, with a deep inhalation, she turns her gaze to his face and he would give anything to kiss her. Give anything to take the hurt look from her eyes. But there is nothing left to give. He presses his lips to her hairline, pulls her a little closer.

They're holding each other up. Both exhausted by hours, and years, of unaddressed emotion. Both worn away by a tide of alcohol and denial. Both choking on a hard cocktail of unfulfilled love, doubt, and poison pathos. He feels how tired he is with her fingers pressed into his back, and it has been a long time since Lenny Bruce was so close to tears.

“I'm too late, aren't I?” she says, and he needs to see her face again, no matter what it does to him.

His hands slide up her sides and cradle her jaw, turning her gaze back to his. He watches her struggle not to cry. And the ocean is running from the whole in his chest, and from the sockets of his eyes.

“I'm too late for Someday,” she repeats and elaborates. “Aren't I?”

He wants to say “no,” whisper it over and over with the shaking of his head. Wants to take her hands and kiss her and lead her to bed. But the word doesn't make it past the lump in his throat. And if he wasn't dead before this moment, he dies here and now.

Because she's right.

Even if he could get the words out. Even if he took her to bed this very minute, it would be too late. He can feel the itch growing under his skin. It would be true when he told her he loved her, but he's a man, and a dead man already, and she's right. It's too late.

And he can't tell her she's wrong.

Her face slips from his grasp and she tucks herself under his chin, balls her fists around his tie and takes his shirt front with it. They cry, quiet and together.

He's wrapped around her when her grip loosens, when his voice returns to him.

“We've always been too late,” he tells the crown of her head. Presses his lips there. “I watched you walk away that night... Watched the sun coming up. I knew it then, but I... I didn't believe it. Didn't _want_ to believe it.”

She's still against him, and he feels the steadying breaths she takes blow warm across his shirt.

“Maybe... if we were different people... If I hadn't been Lenny Bruce – or even Lenny Schneider. If I'd been-”

“Luke.” She speaks the name and pushes him back. She looks up at him with an open and tear-stained face when he looks down at her.

“- and you were -”

“Margot,” she speaks again with the tiniest lift of her lips. But there are still tears in her eyes.

“- instead of Miriam Weissman -” (he thinks he has never spoken her name before) “- Maybe in that other world, we wouldn't have needed a Someday. We would have gotten the timing right from the start.”

She nods and watches him with a rending expression of happy-sadness.

“Maybe then...”She barely whispers, and he thinks she understands the words that didn't make it out. And he wants to kiss her, but that would just sign his death certificate.

“But I'm not him, and you're not her. I'm Lenny fuckin' Bruce,” he tells her hairline. “And you're the marvelous 'Mrs. Maisel.'” And she's smoothing his shirt and tie against his chest as he says it. “And it's always been too late.”

He sighs, and feels the last weight of the ocean trickle out of him, leaving him bone-tired and empty. “It's always been too late,” he repeats, and presses his lips to her hair once more. Not her red lips, or her flushed cheeks. Chaste. Safe.

She sniffles once, twice, and then nothing, and his arms fall back to his sides. Relinquishing her.

He pulls the handkerchief from his pocket – thinks there's no point in hiding the stains, just folds them to the inside – and wipes the last tears and the trails of mascara from her cheeks.

Her eyes are on him, but there's no innocent gilding, or glint of steel. She openly watches him clean her face, and he's too tired. She closes her hand around his when he's done with the handkerchief.

“Luke.” She says the name, and there's almost a question in her voice. But no smile. No knit brow. No smirk forming.

“Yes Margot.” He acknowledges her by her chosen name.

“I'm tired,” she says.

“Me too, baby. Me too.”

~``~

Luke looks at Margot the way Lenny Bruce watches a beautiful woman. Ponderous, focused. He touches Margot gently, briefly, with the same distant familiarity with which Joel Maisel touches his ex-wife.

Margot watches Luke watching her, and she has Mrs. Maisel's confidence and poise. But where Midge might have been almost defiant in the deliberate way she undresses, she is quiet, on the edge of blushing.

Luke turns his back before Margot is naked, and listens to the sound of her slipping into a strange man's pajamas without looking.

They are still themselves, but they are not themselves.

She's surprised when he doesn't slide under the covers with her, just lays himself down beside her.

He's trying to ignore how loud his regret will be in the morning.

He's trying to take in every delicate detail of her, from the red-rimmed eyes to the curls splayed haphazard across the pillow. He's trying to stay awake so that he will never have to wake up and become Lenny Bruce.

And she's scrutinizing him the same way, watching him, refusing to sleep. Her hand finds his and slides it beneath her pillow so he's cradling her cheek. And it's crazy how light it feels with an echoing hole in his chest.

Tomorrow, he will fill that hole with self-loathing and dope.

Tonight, Luke watches Margot, and Margot watches him, until he does drift to sleep.

And when Lenny wakes up, Midge is smiling at him from the doorway, perfectly collected. He smiles back, his laziest, easiest smile, and she laughs. And he laughs, sits up, covers the smile with a smirk and a hand.

She blows him a kiss and she's gone.

~``~

Luke never sees Margot after that night.

~``~

Lenny Bruce grows darker, more incoherent, even more political, if that's possible. Mrs. Maisel remains controversial in some crowds, but also becomes a household name. They are never spotted together anymore, unless they somehow wind up on the bill at the same club, but that's rare. For a time, the rumors of how she got her start flip, and people speculate that she's getting him the gigs he does get. It's all just as wrong....

When Lenny sinks all the way to the ocean floor, Midge disappears for a week. Susie doesn't try to find her, just reschedules what she can and cancels everything else. Mrs. Maisel does not attend the unconventional memorial service later that month.

The next time Midge plays Los Angeles, she vanishes in the Valley for several hours, does her first wasted gig in years, and is critically received that night. She is not, however, arrested for it.

When Midge passes, Esther finds an unfamiliar cigarette lighter amongst her mother's belongings. It's engraved:

to Luke,

All my love,

Margot

“Someday.”

It's a curious – but fleeting – mystery she never solves.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a dream and woke up with the phrase "I would sit seven days for you, you are my beloved" stuck in my head. In the end, sitting shiva was confined to one short paragraph (and misapplied, really), but that's really where this piece began.  
> I was also inspired by the martini scene in Take This Waltz (if you like Luke Kirby, PLEASE go watch it), although not much of it is obvious aside from the martinis. Several pieces of music had a strong influence, including "If I Had A Heart," and "When I Grow Up," by Fever Ray (a third alternate title for this piece could be "I never liked a sad look/From someone who wants to be loved by you"); and, "Parachutes," "Sparks," "Shiver," and "We Never Change," by Coldplay (I recommend revisiting the entire Parachutes album if you haven't recently). And the choice to listen to a crashing waves relaxation video while I wrote also strongly impacted the use of aquatic and maritime metaphors (and kept me from crying through the whole process).   
> Finally, reading about the really Lenny Bruce's life and death, and listening to his stuff, made it important to me to acknowledge his substance abuse, and the sad state of his career at the time of his death. It also made it clear to me that even for fanfiction, I could never really get Lenny and Midge together, no matter how much the show makes me wish they could be.   
> Therefore: alter egos. I originally considered calling the alter egos Luke and Rachel, but that was doubly weird because I feel strangely about RPF (despite everything I just wrote) and I also have couple-friends with those names. I love the name Luke, though, so it stayed, and I borrowed the same-initialed Margot from Take This Waltz.   
> I started writing this weeks ago, and stole time wherever I could until I got sick and went all-in. It has been difficult to stop futzing with it, though, so now it is going up. My apologies for any blatant errors and/or typos (and for my overuse of parentheticals).  
> Thank you for reading.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sing One We Know](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22445167) by [which_chartreuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/which_chartreuse/pseuds/which_chartreuse)




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